Checking out – a new buzz word or the answer to monetizing location-based social networking?

Last week I feverishly posted about Venmo’s new “check out” service without much pause for explanation or analysis. So now, in a slightly calmer state of mind and with a few days spent mulling over the benefits, I’m back with more.

Venmo is an app which “makes it fun and easy to pay and charge friends” and is currently only operational in the US. Venmo acts as a social payment platform by allowing people to exchange money using their phones. Users can then socialise that transaction by attaching a message to the payment and posting it to Twitter or Facebook. It’s this social element which builds unique user stories around purchases – every brand’s dream.



Last week Venmo announced an extra service, which allowed users to attach their location to their socialised transactions – a behaviour Venmo have termed “checking out”. To me, this is exceptionally exciting.

Retailers are already getting on board with the idea of rewarding customers who check-in to their stores and unlock badges associated with offers and deals. A couple of weeks ago, Foursquare launched the ‘Century Club’ badge for people checking in for 100 days on the trot at the same place – rewarding their most frequent and loyal customers. I’m assuming it’ll be coffee shops and delis who will win Century Clubbers – low value purchases which are part of a person’s daily routine.

For any retailer or brand, loyal customers are their bread and butter – a guaranteed flow of trusted consumers. But for retailers with a higher ticket price, or for those wishing to distinguish between frequent, low-spending customers and occasional, high-spending ones, Venmo Places will be right up their street.



In my first job out of university I worked as the wholesale manager for a small boutique food company. After a few months I noticed that I was spending most of my time liasing with, negotiating with, advising and managing a handful of small independent food stores who, together, contributed to just a fragment of yearly sales. Meanwhile, our biggest wholesale customers were being ignored – placing high orders but rarely given the time to be sold in on new products and up-sold on their monthly orders. Having recognized this, I developed a simplifyed order process for our smaller customers, which took the pain out of managing them, and in turn, gave me more time to focus on our more profitable customers.

This is exactly what Venmo Places can offer – visibility on who your most valuable customers are. Not just those routine-orientated Foursquare Mayors who will stop by and check-in every day regardless.



By seeing spend against check-ins, retailers can map tailored rewards to a broad range of customers. They will have invaluable insight on the customers who spend $4 a day every day for a year ($1,460p/a) deserving little treats, and the customers who come in once a month and drop $250 ($2,400p/a) and who, with a little bit more attention and incentivizing, might be upgraded to a bigger monthly spend. It’s business basics with a modern flair. Call me geeky, but that seems like pretty powerful stuff.

Sorry – not available in your country

I thought the days of being the odd kid no one wanted to play with were over. But no, turns out that just living in England can keep you out of the metaphorical sandpit of tech start-ups popping up Stateside. Already this year, I had to suffer the indignity of asking an American what The Daily app interface was like. Ok, it was the guy that designed it, but still.



And today I find out that app-based payment service, Venmo, has added an incredibly exciting feature which, you guessed it, “isn’t available in my country”. Sometimes I wonder why my ancestors couldn’t have just stayed on the boat from Russia for another couple of stops across the Atlantic. Show me the apps Granny!

Anyways, enough whining. Until I get the call from MB SF, I must live vicariously through Mashable and Fast Company. And that new Venmo feature? Location-based payment publishing.



“The Venmo apps for iPhone and Android make it super simple to settle the bill evenly (to the penny, if you like), and given the number of people that are using Venmo to split the bill when they go out, we have integrated with Foursquare and Facebook places to allow you to attach a location to every payment you make.

Venmo Places also makes it really easy to see how often and how much you are spending with your friends at your favorite spots.”

The money shot? This: “Plus, when you publish a payment tagged with a place, it’s a fun way to share your experience with any of your Facebook, Twitter, or Venmo friends who might not have been there. We like to think of it as the “check-out” followup to a Foursquare or Facebook “check-in.””

VERY exciting. Watch this space.

New post now live on Eye Magazine blog. Click HERE.

Re-posted here...

The Self as Brand

I recently wrote a post on the Moving Brands blog about living in the era of the over-share, about how, with so many life-casting tools at our fingertips, we are able to share anything and everything as we go through our day. But just because we can, does it mean we do? Or do these platforms actually allow us to create a rich brand around who we really are by carefully curating and broadcasting a life that is, in fact, a slightly heightened version of the truth?



Most users probably don't think of themselves and their behaviours in terms of 'brand', but that is exactly what social media enables. Apart from those deviants and sociopaths, we've evolved from creating entirely new selves online - like the Barbie and Ken avatars on Second Life. Today, most of us have learned how to portray a pretty accurate interpretation of reality through who we follow, what we 'like', what links we share and the content we post.

As social networking platforms proliferate and the lines between our different selves (the work self, the friend self, the family self) blur and break, it is no wonder that we feel compelled to control how the online world sees us. We wouldn't go to a glamorous party in a pair of old pyjamas, so why would we project anything other than our best selves online?


http://www.howardgrey.com

Today I came across a blog with the mission statement 'This is a blog intended to trick strangers into thinking my life is more exciting than it actually is'. The blog may be called "Slutever…" but the author's frank admission is not so shocking. Who isn't guilty of de-tagging the odd Facebook photo to ensure we look cool, fun and attractive in every picture in our profile?

The location-based check-in services FourSquare and Facebook Places has added an interesting element to personal content curation. The privacy activists may well be concerned about broadcasting their exact location to strangers but, for the self publicist, there are bigger concerns at play, namely where to be "seen" online. The average Londoner could dutifully check in at their tube stop, their place of work and Pret a Manger day in day out, but what's aspirational or taste-making about that? Better, surely, only to check-in at the more exciting places. The places that tell your followers something about you and the kind of person you want to be seen as.



Furthermore, as we identify the self as 'brand' via our allegiances to brands, so companies are reflecting our choices back. More than ever, brands are listening and watching our moves online and rewarding their biggest advocates. From the people who start great Facebook fan pages, to those who become Mayor of their local Starbucks on Foursquare, brands are reaching out and giving them the tools to do the selling for them. As Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, said recently, - "What marketers have always been looking for is trying to get you to sell things to your friends".

From the Middle Eastern beads found in ancient burial sites in Suffolk, to the tribal people of Papua New Guinea using Pentel pens as nose decorations, to the young people of Berlin whose first goal, once the wall came down, was to eat a Big Mac, we have used trading, shopping and brands as a way to enlarge our sense of self. So, is this digital age turning us all into products? Or is it simply another platform on which to communicate a very basic human urge - self-expression? Are the selves that we can create and control online in fact more 'ourselves' than in real life?

Checking into to Hauling

In this month's edition of UK Wired magazine, there is a fascinating article called "Commerce Gets Social - How Your Networks Are Driving What You Buy". The piece looks at different ways innovators and consumers are sharing their purchasing data. From Blippy - a site that lets you share your purchases and see what your friends are buying online, to Groupon - a location-orientated deal-of-the-day site, the race, according to Wired, "is on to monetise the social graph".

Furthermore, and in a move that made me feel like the Winklevoss twins to Wired's Zuckerberg, the piece went on to mention the phenomenon for "hauling". In low-fi YouTube videos, girls share their latest purchase, or hauls, with the world. Stars of hauling have earnt hundreds of thousands of views and lucrative promotional deals. Not so low-fi now.



History tells us that technological advancement and consumer behaviour will continue to evolve. So, can we hypothesise on a potential future based on the evidence around us? We are already hardened "We Live Like This" consumers - surrounding ourselves with the brands, products, services and content which seem best to convey who we are and what we like. This brand-orientated peacocking while pretty normal to us, is instinctive to the digital generation. The 'Like' button is testament to that. Combine this with the new behaviour of "checking in" and something interesting presents itself.

In 2010 alone we went from tentatively checking in to locations on Foursquare in January, to happily checking in to TV shows on Get Glue in December. The fast pace of technology is shortening the distance between the absurd and the mundane. So, what if we can start 'checking in' to products? What if "hauling" goes beyond bedroom videos and onto the highstreet? The scope is huge - from checking in to a new purchase to detailing entire outfit.

So, what data sets could we be sharing with our friends, our network and the brands themselves?
Our username
Our location (place and time)
Our context (captions and comments)
Our spending habits (how much we spent, what partner brands we are pairing alongside)
And the exact moment all the brand's marketing efforts translate into a purchase. That's kind of exciting.

Struggling within the confines of "You are not "creative" therefore you may not have In Design installed" as set by the MB IT department, I have attempted to visualise how this future might look. See below.



Maybe checking it to all this data will prove too much. Maybe registering our every move will render us stationary, but - as Wired states - "The new generation want to scream from the mountaintops what they've bought, and to the largest audience" this hypothesis may not be too far from the truth. Time will tell.

2010 Round Up - The sites, ads, products, services and people that stood out from the noise this year.

Geek crushes

2010 was the year that made geeks hot - largely due to films like The Social Network, Tron and Inception. It was also the year where I spent 10 weeks in San Francisco - home of the nerds. They had me at "tech start-up". Swoon.


Dennis Crowley/ Foursquare


Mark Zuckerberg/ Facebook

Case study examples

Every digital strategy document I write is obviously tailored to the client, but these campaigns somehow kept sneaking in every time. Why? They pushed boundaries, made the most of the medium and enthralled audiences.


Old Spice/ Real-time YouTube video responses to tweets. Hilarious and genius - W&K becomes the hottest agency on the block.


Square/ The new way to pay took the iPad from a big, beautiful iPhone to a functional piece of kit.


MySpace/ Coming hot on the heels of the Gap logo fiasco, the new MySpace logo gave control back to its users, accepting that people want things their way and becoming the visual manifestation of this personalisation trend.... If MySpace was on Facebook, I'd "like" it

Straight talking

Sometimes it's refreshing just to read something in plain English - no "cross-channel multiplatform social media communication plans" bullshit.


The Man Repeller/ Fashion blog about the clothes that repel men. Also introduced the concept of a 'lady boner' to the mainstream.


A Bajillion hits/ Jacking your strat, jacking my lady boner.


Noah Stokes/ This website is so old school it's epic. Who needs HTML5 when you've got it all laid out in primary colours and no bullshit.

Digital life

If, like me, you can't start your day without that surge of serotonin caused by the arrival of an email, then you'll be relying on a heady mix of tools and services to get you through the day.


Google Reader/ Is there a greater feeling for the digitally addicted than over 200 unread articles?



Cross-platform syncing/ Personally, I like living in a world where I can check in using Foursquare and know that the fact that i just walked into a pub will be published across all my social networking sites for my adoring and ever alert 'friends' to comment upon. #don'tbelieveyourownGoogleAlerts

And finally, some of the stuff to watch out for in 2011...


Whipping your hair becomes a cultural phenomenon. I'm doing right now, as I type.


Check-in culture will get out of control, as we start checking in to TV, films and books.

And, finally... cool ad man says, "What?"

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Help them, help you

What happens to brands when the sun never sets online? How can they possibly manage an audience that comes on and offline with the turn of the earth? The Gap Logo 'event' unfolded over four days, but with Brits, New Yorkers and West Coasters all waking up and weighing in every 6 hours, there could be no respite, no time for Gap to gather their thoughts and work out what to do. Exhausted and defeated, they wound up retracting and apologizing - letting more people down than if they'd come back fighting.



By the same token, Foursquare had an unfortunate outage which no doubt gave Facebook Places an unprecedented boost and marked the end of the era when we were happy just to show up someplace without broadcasting it.



Maybe, however, check-in services will be the salvation for brands. As people check into emotions and feelings as well as places, events, products and services, brands will be able to get a hold on what's really going on out there. People feeling angry after lunch in Manchester? Say something funny or wait till 6pm. Everyone jumped up in Austin - give them somewhere to let off some steam.

Powerful global brands of the future will be able to monitor their worldwide audience in real-time via a range of new techniques and advanced date visualization. Brands will discover a broad visibility which allows them to respond and react to their customers on a minute to minute, nation to nation, moving world basis. Big Brother really is watching you now.